Maintaining a document library is a common problem for entities or groups that create a large number of documents. More particularly, it is often difficult to maintain an accurate alignment of ideas, concepts, descriptions, or requirements in the documents that cross reference one another. The reason for this difficulty is that the documents are constantly updated or amended. Changes to a referenced/referencing document must be reflected in the referencing/referenced documents in order to maintain consistency in information.
Known to the field of art are document reference systems that use preset forms and fields to capture information or place information in a document. The fields may be present in database records attached to a form or they may be embedded within sentences in a document. Each of the fields contains information that exists as a part of the document. The boundaries of each field must be established in order to operate in the system. Once populated, the information within the fields is uploaded into a database or otherwise copied to another location by the reference system. When an existing document is used to create a new document, the desired information is copied from a field in the existing document and inserted into a field in the new document. When the field in the older document is later amended, the content of the corresponding field in the newer document is updated, automatically, by the reference system.
There are numerous disadvantages that exist with the prior document reference systems. One disadvantage of prior systems is that they require the use of a special environment outside of the natural word processing environment of the user. Outside their native environment, the clusters of words that represent ideas, concepts, descriptions, or requirements lose their context, increasing the chances that they will be misconstrued or misused. Additionally, the operation of such systems often involves a tedious and complex series of tasks where users are required to transcribe information from a document to a form and/or establish fields within documents. Typically, a number of specially trained personnel are required to administrate, operate, and maintain the reference systems. Even with a dedicated staff managing the operation, the information managed by prior art systems may still become unwieldy and misaligned, especially when there are multiple document authors involved in creating a diverse set of documents for a constantly evolving project. Complexity and required man hours drives the cost of operation of the prior systems to unreasonable levels.
The prior systems do not work effectively in situations where “child” documents paraphrase text from the parent documents. Previous systems modify the exact contents of referencing child documents corresponding to changes made to parent documents, obliterating the work that went into paraphrasing the original into the child document. Since paraphrasing is a fundamental exercise when referencing authoritative literature in a new context, prior systems proved ineffective in this respect.
Thus, there exists a long standing and unmet need for a system that locates complete but singular ideas, concepts, descriptions, and requirements in a wide variety of documents so that the information can be readily and reliably extracted and used in other applications. There is a need for a system that automatically extracts the complete but singular ideas, concepts, descriptions, and requirements from parent documents so that they may be paraphrased in child documents while maintaining a one-to-one relationship, greatly simplifying and focusing consistency checks between the parent and the child. This functionality will allow later changes made to a parent document to be tracked and reflected in a child document without affecting the paraphrasing in the child document. There is a need for a document management system that runs in the native word processing environment of the user and does not require a plethora of highly-trained staff to make it operate effectively. Many fields of industry deal with the arduous task of generating new documents and citing existing documents in a correct and time-efficient manner, thus there is a substantial need for a new system meeting the qualifications listed above. There is a need for a document management system which utilizes and retains paraphrasing created in child documents.